The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me by Sofka Zinovieff Read Free Book Online Page A

and was remembered as dressing up in outrageous costumes. On one occasion he arrived at a large diplomatic party dressed in a black leotard and accompanied by two attendants playing pan pipes, and was tickled to see the ambassador’s horror. ‘[He went] blue in the face with indignation. And little is so pleasing in the sight of God as a blue ambassador.’42 Letters home describe sports more soothing to a mother’s breast, like riding and even (following Byron’s glamorous example) swimming across the Bosphorus.
    In November 1911 – shortly before Mr and Mrs Heber-Percy of Hodnet Hall, Shropshire, were blessed with a fourth son they named Robert – Gerald was posted to Rome. Some of the joy he experienced living there comes out in his fiction, where he describes a city that still retained some of its relaxed nineteenth-century charm. ‘The Forum and the Palatine had not yet been spoilt by archaeologists’, and one could wander or paint at liberty. In the summer the embassy moved southwards to a villa on the Bay of Naples where magnificent terraced gardens filled with orange and lemon groves looked out towards Vesuvius. The British diplomats bathed each day at noon. ‘It was almost too nostalgic. The days passed in a nirvana of delight and some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in a lazy amphibian existence, swimming in the sea or wandering about the hills with sketch book.’43 Gerald’s deepening devotion to Italy was reflected in the inspiration he found in the various intoxicatingly pungent scents: ‘a mixture of drainage, orange blossom and the sea’. In his novel Percy Wallingford, he wrote, ‘I have often thought of asking some chemist to concoct for me reproductions of certain mixed aromas evocative of places I have loved.’
    A PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE FARINGDON ALBUM SHOWING THE HOUSE IN ROME
    Now almost thirty, Gerald established the sort of life he must have longed for. He lived in a series of beautiful houses until, in the 1920s, he finally bought 3 Foro Romano – an elegantly solid, wisteria-clad building on the less accessible side ofthe Roman Forum. Gerald created an entertaining, theatrical environment wherever he lived, and the impressive vaulted drawing room on the piano nobile made the perfect ‘set’. Photographs show rooms decorated with a Renaissance elegance that was also playful: a large brass chandelier, heavy bookcases and impressive paintings were combined with a grand piano covered with objets (a mask, some portraits, a model galleon), and a leopard skin draped across the stool where Gerald sat to compose in the morning.
    The arched loggia looked out across the spectacular sprawl of ancient columns and stone paths where, before the era of fences and tickets, Gerald and his friends could wander or sit in the sun. Gerald was later scathing about the burgeoning influence of archaeologists that made the Forum much less romantic and ‘lost to poets and lovers’. Tito Mannini, Gerald’s cook, bred canaries and once spent all day in the Forum trying to coax them home when they were somehow let out of their cages. Tito was temperamental and not universally loved, but he was a talented cook and made the most delicious chocolate cake with sour cream, rum, angelica and candied cherries. He took on the role of major-domo when Gerald let friends stay at the house in his absence, but there were rumours that he was spotted wearing his employer’s clothes and using the house as a sales room for antiques.
    Roman friends came from a variety of sources, including the British community and the Embassy, where the Ambassador was the Rt Hon. Sir Rennell Rodd and his domineering, party-loving wife, Lilias (‘Lady Rude’).* Gerald also got to know people in Italian high society, the most dashing of whom was the near-mythical Marchesa Casati, with her mesmerising, kohl-rimmed green eyes, white skin and Cleopatra fringe. A central figure in the European avant-garde that was flourishing in Rome,